The Ex Talk(44)

He couldn’t have picked a divier place to drink away his sorrows, if that was in fact what he was doing. Or maybe he was just being young and sprightly. The bar is small and dark and playing Nickelback, which should on its own be a reason to shut it down. It also just feels damp.

“Shay.” He schools his features into this expression of utmost concentration. With one hand, he strokes the counter, his ear intimate enough with it to contract an STD. “Shay. Shhh. I think I can hear the ocean.”

“I’m sure you can, buddy.” I pat his back, and it’s meant to be reassuring, maybe even a little patronizing. It’s rare for me to feel any kind of power with Dominic, and I can’t say I’m not enjoying this. But I can feel the flex of his shoulders beneath his shirt, the firmness of muscle. How warm he is.

I drop my hand.

“Careful. I might have cooties.” He snickers at this.

My head is starting to throb. I should have stopped after one glass of wine, but at least I’m not as far gone as he is. If I’d said yes to drinks earlier, would we both be this plastered?

“I’m so sorry about him,” I tell the bartender, a woman with full sleeves of tattoos who looks like she could probably bench-press two Dominics. “I didn’t realize I’d be taking care of a six-year-old when I came to pick him up.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve seen much worse.” She fills up a glass of water, plunks it in front of him.

“Drink,” I instruct, and though he grumbles, he manages a few sips. “Have you eaten anything?” I interpret his shrug as a no. “Do you serve food?” I ask the bartender.

“Just fries and tots,” she says, so I order one of each.

Since I don’t want to leave until he has a bit of food in his stomach, I hoist myself onto the too-tall stool next to him. Our baskets of grease arrive, along with a bottle of ketchup with just enough inside to make it look like I’m doing something obscene when I slap it against my palm.

“Wow. You really just get right to it,” Dominic says.

I give the bottle another hard shake before the ketchup comes out.

Despite this bar looking like you wouldn’t trust anything that comes out of its kitchen, the food is crisp and salted to perfection. I am eating Tater Tots with my former nemesis in a dive bar at eleven o’clock on a Monday night. My life has ceased to make sense.

After he’s had enough to stop swaying in his seat, I figure it’s safe for us to leave. He struggles to extract his wallet from his back pocket, though, so I fish out my own. “I’ll pay you back later,” he says.

“Oh, I know you will.”

The bartender passes back my credit card. “You two have a good night.”

You two. It’s not an implication that we’re together, just that we are two human beings leaving a bar at the same time.

It might be a Monday, but that doesn’t stop Capitol Hill. Hipsters loiter outside bars, the chilly April air thick with cigarette smoke and weed. Dominic isn’t wearing a jacket, just the slate-gray button-down he had on at work that’s come untucked.

He slings an arm around my shoulders and slumps against me, which, given our height difference, must look comical. After a moment’s hesitation, I reach around his waist to steady him. It’s the closest we’ve ever been—even closer when his shirt rides up, and for the briefest moment, my fingers graze the warm skin of his lower back.

I draw back so suddenly that he attempts to right himself, relying more on his own legs than on my five-two frame. “Sorry. I was probably putting too much weight on you.” He pats the shoulder of my jacket. “You’re tiny.”

“The least you can do is try not to insult me after I rescue you from Nickelback and J?germeister.”

“It wasn’t an insult.” He stares down at me, his gaze impossible to read as always. I feel not just tiny but like I’m giving a presentation at a senior staff meeting wearing only nipple tassels and my favorite public radio socks—I wouldn’t be Shay Goldstein if I didn’t have multiple pairs—with a fish holding a microphone beneath the words Ira Bass. “What’s the tallest guy you’ve dated?”

“I don’t understand how that’s relevant.” And yet as I think through my dating history, my wine-jumbled mind snags on the memory of us in the station kitchen. The way he loomed over me, caging me in. Pressing the glass of water to my cheek. How I felt small but safe, and a whole lot of other feelings I never gave my body permission to feel. Feelings I am definitely not experiencing right now.

I guess it doesn’t hurt to humor him. “I dated someone a few years ago who was six one.”

“Silly,” he says, and he boops my nose. He’s going to die when I rub this in his face tomorrow. “You’re supposed to say me. Where’s the car?”

“Since I was in the middle of a glass of wine when you texted, I took a Lyft.” I pull up my phone to order another one, then maneuver us to a bench facing the street. He flops onto it next to me, head dropping to my shoulder. With this lack of control over his limbs, he’s like once of those inflatable tube creatures at car dealerships. But heavier. And smelling only a little like alcohol—much less than I’d think after spending a couple of hours in that bar—and a little like sweat, but mostly like Dominic. Woodsy and clean.